American Essays

From the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling award-winning author of Serena and The Cove, thirty of his finest short stories, collected in one volume. No one captures the complexities of Appalachia—a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty—as evocatively and indelibly as author and...

A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world...

One of America's preeminent thinkers provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America's new monopolies. Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we...

WHAT IS IT THAT DRIVES THE SUCCESS OF AMERICA AND THE IDENTITY OF ITS PEOPLE? ACCLAIMED WRITER AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR TO THIS AMERICAN LIFE JACK HITT THINKS IT’S BECAUSE WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF AMATEURS. America’s self-invented tinkerers are back at it in their metaphorical...

From New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa, a sweeping human history of El Paso, revealing violence, power, and privilege at play in America's most famous border town. El Paso has been called the “Ellis Island” of America’s southern border, a mountain pass cum border town cum bifurcated...

A reissue of Greg Tate's classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove. From one of the most original, creative, and provocative culture critics comes an eye-opening collection of essays and tales about American music and...

Back in print after two decades, the story of Hollywood’s most exclusive hotel and its star-studded guest list Raymond Sarlot bought the Chateau Marmont in 1975, but what was originally a business purchase became a love affair as he delved into the hotel’s incredible history. From its perch...

An urgent exposition of the pervasive human trafficking that lies just beneath the surface of the US economy—from the stories of its survivors The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light the exploitation of workers. In this moment of heightened visibility, Unbroken Chains demands...

Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves.

“A must-read for today’s politics” (San Francisco Chronicle), the brilliant and provocative essays that established National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh as one of the most important commentators on America’s class problem are collected in one searing and insightful volume. In Bone...

In this powerful and wide-ranging collection of essays, Rebecca Solnit turns her attention to the war at home. This is a war, she says, "[W]ith so many casualties that we should call it by its true name, this war with so many dead by police, by violent ex-husbands and partners and lovers, by people pursuing power and profit at the point of a gun or just shooting first and figuring out who they hit later."

“Fun, engrossing, and significant. . . . History in Davis’s hands is loud, coarse, painful, funny, irreverent—and memorable.”—San Francisco Chronicle Here, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of its debut as a New York Times bestseller, is the revised, updated, and expanded edition...

Over the last decade, William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for 21st-century American literature.

The ethos of East Texas is especially embodied in the story of Jeff Traylor, former head coach of the Gilmer Buckeyes, and his long-time coaching staff. A native son, Traylor and his band of brothers transformed the Buckeyes into champions, and in doing so help tell the story of the entire region's obsession with high school football, and undeniable influence on all levels of the sport. This is the story of the coach, the team, and the region.

“Contravening conventional wisdom, Zelizer offers a spirited defense of parties and partisanship.” —Frances Lee, Princeton University Partisanship is a dirty word in American politics. If there is one issue on which almost everyone in our divided country seems to agree, it’s the belief...

A memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poets In a New York Times review of Alice Notley’s 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that “the radical freshness of Notley’s poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style...

Entre los intelectuales de izquierda, Noam Chomsky se distingue por su especial relación con el activismo, y por ser él mismo un activista político de larguísimo recorrido, además de un crítico implacable y clarividente. En este libro, que puede leerse como el legado de Chomsky a los...

The Civil War, the most dramatic moment in this nation's history, also produced some of our greatest literature. From tragic charges to prison escapes to the desolation wrought on those who stayed behind, Blood is an extraordinary collection of reminiscences, fiction, and excerpts from diaries and letters by an array of soldiers, writers, and observers.

A celebration of tardiness through funny, revealing, and deeply thoughtful essays on the nature of time and collective memory In Colored People Time, Manny Fidel explores how race, culture, and history shape not only our lives, but our sense of time itself. Through sharp, personal, and...